From a rectal kit to a Berlin Wall-era transmitter: the artefacts of Australia’s spy museum which doesn’t exist – yet

Mike Pritchard has built a vast collection of espionage-related items and wants to start the Australian Spy Museum. Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/The Guardian

Every morning Mike Pritchard eats breakfast next to a Stasi surveillance rack. The machine, sitting on a couple of milk crates near his dining room table, is composed of colour-coded buttons, switches and dials. It contains a surveillance receiver, a controller for up to 10 receivers, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and a numbers-station broadcast box.

“The equipment in this rack can be seen in the German film The Lives of Others,” the Sydney man says. “It’s absolutely been used. They used this stuff every day. Remember, this was a police state – they are using this stuff to listen to everybody. This is not a once-a-month thing, it’s your day job.”